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Deploy patches safely and sanely in a CI/CD workflow

DevOps aims to improve collaboration, and it certainly can do that. But software deployment grinds to a halt if teams don't establish a strategy and adopt tools to deploy patches without disrupting workflows or application stability. Ideally, DevOps tools and methodologies should substantially reduce the time to fix, which is an all-important software metric. Practitioners can run into obstacles, however, when trying to integrate legacy patching processes with new workflows and systems that change both development and IT processes and tools. The foundation of DevOps process agility is automation of the entire software development pipeline from code building and review to testing and deployment. The techniques of continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) and the need for automation tools to streamline the process are universally accepted concepts. Even so, the application of these techniques, as well as the selection of automation tools, is inconsistent. Many times, IT and development organizations are forced to cobble ...